I know there are a lot of strong feelings on both sides of this debate, but we can't have an intelligent discussion unless and until we agree to all of the salient and indisputable facts.
Countries in the Indian Ocean just suffered from an earthquake and tsunami that literally killed 100 times as many people as 9/11.
Around 50,000 people worked in the WTC; they were all targets on that day, and if the towers had fallen immediately due to the impact then everyone in the buildings at the time would have been dead.
Nature is Nature; we just have to be aware of what it's doing and stay clear of the major risks (quake-proof buildings, stay out of low-lying areas and flood plains during hurricanes, etc). Terrorists are another matter; Al Qaeda has the avowed goal of killing as many Americans as possible. The damage they will do is limited only by their capability. If they laid their hands on a nuke, you can bet they'd use it. If they got Sarin, ditto. The only way to protect against terrorists such as Al Qaeda is to make certain that they do not acquire such capabilities. Unfortunately, such insurance is not cheap or easy.
For some reason there are people who don't even think it's "socially acceptable"; there are lots of people who will condemn you for taking the threat seriously, despite the indisputable history (embassy bombings, USS Cole, WTC, numerous public statements from Osama bin Laden declaring his intent). There is no way to have a reasoned argument with someone who denies historical fact.
The image shows pitting on all sides, as a small unbroken object would; a larger object would also have slowed less, struck harder and wound up more vaporized and/or fragmented. I like the idea that it came in at a grazing angle and landed slowly, perhaps clipping something like a crater rim before rolling or bouncing to a stop. Close photographic examination may find abrasion marks which could illustrate its last moments before coming to rest.
The problem is when the oxygen sensor is not giving a signal, such as on a cold start. You need to have a roughly-combustible mixture to get the engine to fire, and if you've changed the composition a lot while the car was shut down (such as refilling most of the tank with pure gasoline or E-85 when it had previously contained only the other) the mixture parameters stored from the last run will be way off. The only way to get it even approximately right is to be able to sense the composition of the fuel coming from the tank.
I understand that water in "gasohol" leads to emulsification (phase separation) and nasty running. I guess you need more people from Weights & Measures taking samples, testing composition and issuing fines (or even shutdown orders) for violations.
we could put in an oil tax, but that would hurt the economy alot.
Dealing with oil-financed terrorists doesn't hurt the economy? I'd rather pay for those defense expenses at the pump (where they are incurred) instead of via my income taxes; an oil tax would give everyone an incentive to reduce the problem by becoming more efficient.
I (finally, belatedly) checked this. The Federal tax exemption isn't the full 18.4 cents/gallon, but 5.2 cents/gallon; this amounts to a $0.52/gallon subsidy for ethanol. That's still about $2/gallon to $2.50/gallon of energy actually created.
... ethanol is the only easy way to meet their air quality requirements.
That's actually not true any more. Modern vehicles do not require oxygenated fuels to meet emissions standards. So-called "reformulated gasoline" requires special low-vapor-pressure blends (more expensive, probably less efficient) to meet specifications when blended with ethanol, and the influence on emissions is mixed (and mostly good for cold-weather rather than smog-forming emissions).
(They used to use something else, started with an M, but it pollutes the ground water).
Methyl tert-butyl ether, MTBE. Nasty stuff by almost any description, and it pollutes reservoirs (from 2-cycle watercraft) as well as groundwater.
Don't forget to factor in all the subsidies that oil gets. By many counts, oil gets more than ethanol.
Unless those subsidies are between the refinery and the pump (I don't know of any), they apply equally to the oil that shows up at the truck stop and the oil that goes into planting, cultivating, weeding, fertilizing and harvesting the corn which becomes ethanol. (And distilling it too, if the distillers are using propane-fired stills.)
Changing the lines and seals costs pennies. The real problem is being able to deal with a fuel which can vary so widely in stoichiometric mixture and vapor pressure. Consider the case of a vehicle which has 1/8 tank of gasoline, shuts down next to an E-85 pump, is refuelled with E-85 and then not restarted for two hours in 0 degree F conditions. How does the fuel system know what mixture to use to get a combustible mixture when the engine is cranked? You need a good fuel-composition sensor and smart software, and the last I heard (which was a while ago, I admit) both of these left something to be desired.
(Disclaimer: I've worked in the auto industry, on engine-control software. I am not an expert on flex-fuel matters, and I don't know what the state of the art is at the moment.)
If 90% of the waste biomass could be captured it would replace about 27%, and perhaps something else (like electricity from the abundant wind resources of western AB, SK and MB) could replace the remaining 73%. Just a thought.
Who says farming would be uneconomical if it was an energy sink? The inputs and outputs of farming are very different and are treated dissimilarly; for instance, 10% ethanol blends of gasoline are exempt from the US federal gasoline tax (of 19 cents/gallon, I seem to recall) so the ethanol is subsidized to the tune of $1.90/gallon. If each gallon of ethanol required one gallon of off-road diesel at $1.40 to make, it would pay $.50/gallon even though the gallon of ethanol contains a lot less energy than the gallon of diesel.
Such are the insanities of subsidy economics. You might notice that ethanol isn't subsidized on the basis of net energy created, but per gallon. A 34% gain means that the subsidy costs nearly $7.60/gallon equivalent of energy created; if the gain is only 25%, the subsidy is $9.50/gallon equivalent! The discontinued coal-liquefaction subsidies did have the virtue of being cheaper.
I suggest that we tax fossil carbon releases or petroleum imports (whatever is more important to get rid of), eliminate the subsidies and let the chips fall out where they may.
Letting straw rot has the advantage of feeding all kinds of decomposers, including fungi, which hold the soil together. (Zero-till leaves the roots in the soil and feeds them anyway, but not quite as much.) Raw cellulose contains little in the way of nitrogen.
The grandparent poster may have meant that natural gas is used to make fertilizer (methane steam-reformed to hydrogen, the hydrogen combined with nitrogen to make ammonia [NH3] in the Haber process, ammonia either applied as-is or oxidized to nitrate). As I am not a chemist or agricultural scientist, I have no idea if the nitrogen removed with wheat, rice, etc. straw can be used to make as much fixed nitrogen as the plant removed, more, or less. Perhaps someone with more expertise in these matters will see this and respond.
There have been lots of attempts to "buy more time", conspicuously CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations in the US. They were touted as means to the end of energy independence, and they have been abject failures by this measure.
Petroleum is still pretty cheap even after the recent runup in oil prices. If you want to get people to stop using so much petroleum, you have to make petroleum expensive enough to get their attention. Making ethanol as cheap as petroleum is just going to feed the increase in demand.
Would it be wrong to leave a package on it to re-aim it at a later date? Imagine if we had something on a rock going past Earth in 2005. If we could suddenly divert it to take out Pyongyang, should we?
You can argue all you like that other fuel options may be better or that biodiesel can not be sustained.. it's just too bad your opinion doesn't count. It is already number one both here in the US and abroad....
It seems that you have not yet grasped the difference between "growing" and "able to replace other supplies". Remember that 36 billion gallon figure for road diesel alone? Wikipedia says that total production of vegetable oils in the US is only 4.5 billion gallons. Biodiesel from higher plants is never going to replace petroleum; it can grow like mad for a while, but it is limited to far less than our current needs (which is a fact that you don't seem to get despite repeated corrections).
Well it's a good thing soybeans are only 18% usable oil, while Jatropha plants, wild Castor.. Mustard seed, Rape Seed and Cotton see are much more than that.. upwards of 30% or on average double that of Soybeans.
That's the oil fraction of the seed. I suppose it didn't occur to you to think about how much seed (and therefore oil) there is per acre, which is rather important when you are trying to calculate the area which would be required for fuel crops. Orders of magnitude matter. I realize that you're not used to thinking about such things, but really... if you need arable land equal to 150% of the area of the nation, an improvement in oil fraction from 18% to 30% isn't going to help you. Imports won't help; people overseas aren't going to power your SUV instead of feeding themselves.
Without a shred of support, then or now. Four exchanges since your initial post you still haven't documented that the essential resources (starting with land) exist. I suppose you don't know how.
Seems like you're the one listening and repeating the unsupported word of farm lobbyists...
Really? Cite my post and the lobbyist (full URLs for both). Bet you a C-note that you can't.
If the US doesn't begin seriously working with biodiesel and expanding what infrastructure is needed, the rest of the world will leave us behind gasping our last breath while the petrol drains us dry. It is the only viable renewable source of energy for use as a liquid fuel.
(Emphasis added.) You want to support that only claim? Put a hundred on that too? There's always coal-to-liquids. Take the other bets and I'll put down fifty bucks even-odds that wind power feeding batteries is cheaper per hp-hr at the wheels than biodiesel from virgin oil from any major crop. Solar photovoltaic is catching up, and the amount of power required is well within the limits of what we can generate with sunlight that's wasted on roofs. Efficiency matters; 15% is many times better than you get from higher plants.
p.s. Haven't heard a word from you about a better alternative...
Oh, like it makes any difference when I'm pointing out that your claims are unsupported and your logic defective. Thanks for illustrating the logical fallacy of the non sequitur. (Two alternatives above.)
It's up to you to provide the references to make your case; demanding that others disprove your unsupported claims is just a way of being a jerk. I could spend a large part of the day fisking your post, but as I've got better things to do I'll restrict myself to two points.
The National Biodiesel Board explicitly says that its production capacity is only 150 million gallons per year, with another 200 million potential. At the limit this is less than 1% of road-diesel consumption and about 0.6% of total distillate fuel consumption.
US production of soybeans in 2004 was 3.15 billion bushels. At a yield of 11.5 pounds per bushel and a guesstimated 7 pounds/gallon, the entire US soybean crop would produce 5.18 billion gallons of soybean oil. You would need roughly 7 times as much production to replace all over-the-road diesel and 12 times as much to replace all distillate fuel oil consumption; I'm not going to waste the time to calculate what it would take to replace motor gasoline (that's your homework, and you're flunking).
Total US acreage of soybeans harvested in 2004 was roughly 74 million acres, or 116,000 square miles. 12 times this is about 1.4 million square miles. Total area of the USA is 3.5 million square miles, so you are talking about planting another 40% of the land area of the USA in soybeans (over and above the area already used for other crops) just to replace distillate fuel oil use.
You need to stop accepting the unsupported word of farm lobbyists and start using your brain. You also need to learn what "research" means. As in, research the renewable energy technologies and determine which ones yield adequate energy per unit area to support the US economy.
They give you 25 years warranty that it will produce some power. Not 25 years that it will produce at the same level as shipped.
Of course it won't produce the same level as shipped, but 100% of rated power (when "shipped" is 120%) is a long way from "some". (I notice that you didn't quote the warranty language, so you have no idea how much the output can be expected to decay over time. That's because the warranty isn't on-line. I can't find Kyocera's either... I see a trend here.)
I said 10% on the roof.
Then you were too vague, and you should learn to write more clearly.
Dirt isn't under the control of a panel manufacturer, and it washes off.
Even after all that, 10% of the sunlight falling on a typical roof amounts to one heap of energy. Even if that was the best we could do, getting enough square meters under such panels would make a huge impact; the USA has a total impervious surface area roughly the size of Ohio, and the amount of solar energy falling on it is staggering.
In other words, I don't see you making clear claims or supporting your general pessimism with figures.
As for your comparison to other semiconductor products, you are confused. Solar cells do not require multiple etching steps; you can grow a doped crystal, cut it into pieces (and save the dust for reprocessing), dope one side of it the other way to create the junction, and add contacts. You're not masking, cutting trenches, sputtering multiple layers of interconnects or any of the chemical-intensive processes which characterize LSI chips, so any claim of pollution which draws on LSI production data is inherently flawed.
You gave no information (like per-acre yields and processing requirements) that would actually support your claim. Even when you quoted an on-line publication, you couldn't be bothered to give a URL.
Reality is not "socially constructed". Public opinion is not going to wish oilseed crops into existence, and it's not going to tolerate cutting down forests and plowing up parks and prairies to get enough acres planted. The change you desire will only come about if it is technically, energetically, ecologically and socially feasible, and you have not established any of the four.
And I speak as the owner of a diesel car who is going to start making his own just as soon as he has the workspace to do it. Here's a dollar, take a ride on the clue bus.
We already grow all the biomass we need to replace fossil petrol.
Pardon me if I don't accept your unsupported word on this. Got any cites to back yourself up? And you wanna put some money on that?
Biodiesel isn't a good way to provide electricity... imagine running diesel generators non-stop to try and supply all the energy needs for even a small country.. impossible.
Funny, that's exactly how some small countries (islands and such) supply their electricity. Diesels are still used as peaking generators in some parts of the USA, if I'm not mistaken, and diesels are sold for electric generation purposes (you can order them today). Big diesels can hit 50% thermal efficiency, quite a bit better than steam turbines and up there with combined-cycle plants (and a lot more throttleable).
So I'm not even attempting to say that all fossil fuels will be replaced, just diesel and gasoline
Tell me how much of the US land mass would have to be planted in cotton, flax, mustard, canola/rape, etc. to replace petroleum motor fuel. You will find petroleum information here.
If you add it all up we already produce billions of barrels of viable oils and with a demand market farmers would have even more incentive to grow these cash crops.
You're saying that these oils are produced now... for no purpose whatsoever? Pardon my skepticism. I seem to recall reading that the US uses about 1 billion gallons of edible oils per year (a few gallons per capita), which seems about right; even if it was 100% converted to biodiesel, it only represents a small fraction of on-road diesel consumption, forget total motor fuel consumption.
Tell me how much you're willing to wager, I can use the money.
Unless you are able to come up with a massive increase in productivity (e.g. by intensive farming of oleaginous algae), all the biological productivity of the North American continent will not replace the fossil fuels used there.
Biodiesel is a great route for disposing of waste fat, make no mistake. And thermal depolymerization is going to be a wonderful system for turning organic waste into valuable products, too. But running our society on them? No, the energy we require is far too great for such inefficient pathways to supply it.
For those of us who have studied chemistry but missed out on that little part, would you tell us exactly HOW a catalytic converter will get rid of CO2 emissions?
In a blatant examples of seeing others as you see yourself, you wrote:
No, at this point is is illogical to expect reason from the scientists on this issue. Religion clouded their judgement and now they are in too deep to even consider whether they were wrong.
Oh, yeah. Like the General Relativity skeptics refused to consider themselves wrong after the 1919 solar eclipse showed that gravity bends light. Or like skeptic geologists refused to consider themselves wrong when continental drift was proven. Or the doctors who had been skeptical of the infectious theory of ulcers refused to consider themselves wrong when helicobacter pylorii was discovered, cultured and proven to be capable of causing ulcers by infection (and of curing ulcers using antibiotics to kill the infection). They all stuck to their orthodoxy to save their careers.
Oh, wait, none of that happened. So why are you claiming that scientists are close-minded?
There are a few things that are known beyond any principled denial:
Earth is roughly 50 degrees F warmer than a body with its absorptive characteristics would be at our distance from the Sun, absent other influences. (Venus is an extreme example.) This proves the greenhouse effect.
The greenhouse effect is due to a number of gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide.
Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, particularly non-condensible ones, will have a warming effect on the Earth.
Now, you can have principled disputes about the interactions of mechanisms at work (greenhouse vs. reflective clouds), but you cannot deny that increasing the concentration of the most important non-condensible greenhouse gas by a large fraction is certain to do something. I see you dismissing the entire concept as religious dogma; it appears to me that your dismissal is itself dogma, like the political attempt to dismiss evolution from biology classes.
You also engage in non-sequiturs.
Yes there is also a lot of very compelling evidence on the other side, but not enough to call the matter settled, and in my opinion not enough to justify preemtive war against ourselves that will certainly cause massive social and economic harm.
You are using a claim of economic damage to deny a scientific conclusion which suggests a need for action. Well, gee, if I posit a scientific conclusion about the way that cholera and typhoid are spread it might suggest a need for billions of dollars of investment in water treatment systems! Our budgets are too tight, so by your "reasoning" my conclusion has to be wrong.
Or maybe it's time for you to realize that the world isn't always as you like it. In other words, grow up.
This is just another way of keeping people from entering the USA on student visas and dropping out of sight; if they vanish from the student database without leaving the country, they can be marked for pickup for violating the terms of their visa. Without a list of students, you can't do that.
I doubt that anyone would want to live inside a structure which is blazing hot in the daytime and cold at night, so the un-improved cardboard house is probably limited to coastal areas with limited diurnal and seasonal temperature variations.
That isn't the end, though. Anyone who's using PETE films could add a layer of inflatable honeycomb (ships deflated) between two cardboard skins, and the user could inject foam into the honeycomb after assembly. Voila, insulated wall. This still does not give thermal mass to control temperature variations, but PETE holds water nicely; maybe water bladders in the walls? The more water you add, the more stable the structure becomes. Or make the bladders of a breathable fabric like Tyvek, and fill with mud; the mud dries to become thermal mass and acoustic barrier.
Cost of land is independent of the cost of the structure, and in many places land is appreciating; a structure which has close to zero "demolition" cost would make the land value much more liquid than something permanent.
Not that it would help you, nobody's going to sell to a slime-based organism with goals of world domination.
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Nature is Nature; we just have to be aware of what it's doing and stay clear of the major risks (quake-proof buildings, stay out of low-lying areas and flood plains during hurricanes, etc). Terrorists are another matter; Al Qaeda has the avowed goal of killing as many Americans as possible. The damage they will do is limited only by their capability. If they laid their hands on a nuke, you can bet they'd use it. If they got Sarin, ditto. The only way to protect against terrorists such as Al Qaeda is to make certain that they do not acquire such capabilities. Unfortunately, such insurance is not cheap or easy.
For some reason there are people who don't even think it's "socially acceptable"; there are lots of people who will condemn you for taking the threat seriously, despite the indisputable history (embassy bombings, USS Cole, WTC, numerous public statements from Osama bin Laden declaring his intent). There is no way to have a reasoned argument with someone who denies historical fact.
He needs a life.
The image shows pitting on all sides, as a small unbroken object would; a larger object would also have slowed less, struck harder and wound up more vaporized and/or fragmented. I like the idea that it came in at a grazing angle and landed slowly, perhaps clipping something like a crater rim before rolling or bouncing to a stop. Close photographic examination may find abrasion marks which could illustrate its last moments before coming to rest.
I understand that water in "gasohol" leads to emulsification (phase separation) and nasty running. I guess you need more people from Weights & Measures taking samples, testing composition and issuing fines (or even shutdown orders) for violations.
(Disclaimer: I've worked in the auto industry, on engine-control software. I am not an expert on flex-fuel matters, and I don't know what the state of the art is at the moment.)
If 90% of the waste biomass could be captured it would replace about 27%, and perhaps something else (like electricity from the abundant wind resources of western AB, SK and MB) could replace the remaining 73%. Just a thought.
Such are the insanities of subsidy economics. You might notice that ethanol isn't subsidized on the basis of net energy created, but per gallon. A 34% gain means that the subsidy costs nearly $7.60/gallon equivalent of energy created; if the gain is only 25%, the subsidy is $9.50/gallon equivalent! The discontinued coal-liquefaction subsidies did have the virtue of being cheaper.
I suggest that we tax fossil carbon releases or petroleum imports (whatever is more important to get rid of), eliminate the subsidies and let the chips fall out where they may.
The grandparent poster may have meant that natural gas is used to make fertilizer (methane steam-reformed to hydrogen, the hydrogen combined with nitrogen to make ammonia [NH3] in the Haber process, ammonia either applied as-is or oxidized to nitrate). As I am not a chemist or agricultural scientist, I have no idea if the nitrogen removed with wheat, rice, etc. straw can be used to make as much fixed nitrogen as the plant removed, more, or less. Perhaps someone with more expertise in these matters will see this and respond.
Petroleum is still pretty cheap even after the recent runup in oil prices. If you want to get people to stop using so much petroleum, you have to make petroleum expensive enough to get their attention. Making ethanol as cheap as petroleum is just going to feed the increase in demand.
Would it be wrong to leave a package on it to re-aim it at a later date? Imagine if we had something on a rock going past Earth in 2005. If we could suddenly divert it to take out Pyongyang, should we?
Biodiesel is not unlike ethanol, but without the miserable energetics. It might surprise you that ethanol is way ahead of biodiesel at 2.81 billion gallons in 2003. The only biofuels that have a chance to replace petroleum will come from algae, which are orders of magnitude more efficient than higher plants.
You haven't supported your billions of barrels of viable oils claim either. Quelle surprise.
Without a shred of support, then or now. Four exchanges since your initial post you still haven't documented that the essential resources (starting with land) exist. I suppose you don't know how. Really? Cite my post and the lobbyist (full URLs for both). Bet you a C-note that you can't. (Emphasis added.) You want to support that only claim? Put a hundred on that too? There's always coal-to-liquids. Take the other bets and I'll put down fifty bucks even-odds that wind power feeding batteries is cheaper per hp-hr at the wheels than biodiesel from virgin oil from any major crop. Solar photovoltaic is catching up, and the amount of power required is well within the limits of what we can generate with sunlight that's wasted on roofs. Efficiency matters; 15% is many times better than you get from higher plants. Oh, like it makes any difference when I'm pointing out that your claims are unsupported and your logic defective. Thanks for illustrating the logical fallacy of the non sequitur. (Two alternatives above.)- The National Biodiesel Board explicitly says that its production capacity is only 150 million gallons per year, with another 200 million potential. At the limit this is less than 1% of road-diesel consumption and about 0.6% of total distillate fuel consumption.
- US production of soybeans in 2004 was 3.15 billion bushels. At a yield of 11.5 pounds per bushel and a guesstimated 7 pounds/gallon, the entire US soybean crop would produce 5.18 billion gallons of soybean oil. You would need roughly 7 times as much production to replace all over-the-road diesel and 12 times as much to replace all distillate fuel oil consumption; I'm not going to waste the time to calculate what it would take to replace motor gasoline (that's your homework, and you're flunking).
You need to stop accepting the unsupported word of farm lobbyists and start using your brain. You also need to learn what "research" means. As in, research the renewable energy technologies and determine which ones yield adequate energy per unit area to support the US economy.Total US acreage of soybeans harvested in 2004 was roughly 74 million acres, or 116,000 square miles. 12 times this is about 1.4 million square miles. Total area of the USA is 3.5 million square miles, so you are talking about planting another 40% of the land area of the USA in soybeans (over and above the area already used for other crops) just to replace distillate fuel oil use.
- Then you were too vague, and you should learn to write more clearly.
- Dirt isn't under the control of a panel manufacturer, and it washes off.
- Even after all that, 10% of the sunlight falling on a typical roof amounts to one heap of energy. Even if that was the best we could do, getting enough square meters under such panels would make a huge impact; the USA has a total impervious surface area roughly the size of Ohio, and the amount of solar energy falling on it is staggering.
In other words, I don't see you making clear claims or supporting your general pessimism with figures.As for your comparison to other semiconductor products, you are confused. Solar cells do not require multiple etching steps; you can grow a doped crystal, cut it into pieces (and save the dust for reprocessing), dope one side of it the other way to create the junction, and add contacts. You're not masking, cutting trenches, sputtering multiple layers of interconnects or any of the chemical-intensive processes which characterize LSI chips, so any claim of pollution which draws on LSI production data is inherently flawed.
Reality is not "socially constructed". Public opinion is not going to wish oilseed crops into existence, and it's not going to tolerate cutting down forests and plowing up parks and prairies to get enough acres planted. The change you desire will only come about if it is technically, energetically, ecologically and socially feasible, and you have not established any of the four.
And I speak as the owner of a diesel car who is going to start making his own just as soon as he has the workspace to do it. Here's a dollar, take a ride on the clue bus.
Tell me how much you're willing to wager, I can use the money.
Biodiesel is a great route for disposing of waste fat, make no mistake. And thermal depolymerization is going to be a wonderful system for turning organic waste into valuable products, too. But running our society on them? No, the energy we require is far too great for such inefficient pathways to supply it.
For those of us who have studied chemistry but missed out on that little part, would you tell us exactly HOW a catalytic converter will get rid of CO2 emissions?
Oh, wait, none of that happened. So why are you claiming that scientists are close-minded?
There are a few things that are known beyond any principled denial:
- Earth is roughly 50 degrees F warmer than a body with its absorptive characteristics would be at our distance from the Sun, absent other influences. (Venus is an extreme example.) This proves the greenhouse effect.
- The greenhouse effect is due to a number of gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide.
- Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, particularly non-condensible ones, will have a warming effect on the Earth.
Now, you can have principled disputes about the interactions of mechanisms at work (greenhouse vs. reflective clouds), but you cannot deny that increasing the concentration of the most important non-condensible greenhouse gas by a large fraction is certain to do something. I see you dismissing the entire concept as religious dogma; it appears to me that your dismissal is itself dogma, like the political attempt to dismiss evolution from biology classes.You also engage in non-sequiturs.
You are using a claim of economic damage to deny a scientific conclusion which suggests a need for action. Well, gee, if I posit a scientific conclusion about the way that cholera and typhoid are spread it might suggest a need for billions of dollars of investment in water treatment systems! Our budgets are too tight, so by your "reasoning" my conclusion has to be wrong.Or maybe it's time for you to realize that the world isn't always as you like it. In other words, grow up.
This is just another way of keeping people from entering the USA on student visas and dropping out of sight; if they vanish from the student database without leaving the country, they can be marked for pickup for violating the terms of their visa. Without a list of students, you can't do that.
That isn't the end, though. Anyone who's using PETE films could add a layer of inflatable honeycomb (ships deflated) between two cardboard skins, and the user could inject foam into the honeycomb after assembly. Voila, insulated wall. This still does not give thermal mass to control temperature variations, but PETE holds water nicely; maybe water bladders in the walls? The more water you add, the more stable the structure becomes. Or make the bladders of a breathable fabric like Tyvek, and fill with mud; the mud dries to become thermal mass and acoustic barrier.
Not that it would help you, nobody's going to sell to a slime-based organism with goals of world domination.